commission painting to match existing armies.
Some of the most challenging parts of commission painting are receiving commissions to complete an existing army. This is always challenging no matter the level of painting skill the previous miniatures were completed with. The real challenge is painting miniatures that will blend in with the rest of the army.
You need to study the colour schemes and even the painting style of the existing miniatures. You have to work out if the previous painter used shades, blending, dry brushing and what types of paint were used. All of this needs to be worked out before you put brush to paint.
In the sections bellow we will have a look at a few examples of miniatures that I’ve had to match the paint and styles for.
The Burning Beard logo is above the miniatures I painted.
First up we have some Kataphron Destroyers, I had no idea of the colours that were used to paint the original parts of this Adeptus Mechanicus army.
I spent a good amount of time just looking at the miniature and collecting paints together that I think will match.
once I had collected what I thought were the correct colours I had to test them all on a pallet to see how close the colours are.
The Necrons in this commission were a mix of flat layered colours with a wash over the top. With a simple dark grey highlight over the black.
One of the hardest things to match on this commission was the dark burnt grass tufts.
These Salamanders were painted mainly with contrast paints and some GW metallic paint.
As you can see its not as easy as you might think to match colour schemes for existing miniatures but I like to take my time and try as hard as I can to match the older miniatures. There will always be subtle shade differences and slightly brighter or darker highlights but the key is to get the miniatures to look as similar as possible so that the army wont look strange on the table top.